DIRT IN THE CITY

Port Harcourt is dirty! Port Harcourt is dirty! And by Port Harcourt, I also mean Obio/Akpor. The irony, however, is that people who especially should be upholding laws are the ones violating them.
Sometime last year, around a police check point, I saw a police officer, his rifle on the ground, passing faeces by the sidewalk while his colleague watched for him. I was more than irritated.If you move around some parts of the city, especially Ikwerre Road and Ada George, you will find garbage lining the median strip. Perhaps, the people who put them there at night expect them to evolve into flowers at dawn. It's amazing how these people who dispose so much garbage cannot afford waste bags. So, everything they dump there begins to scatter all over the place. I do not know which is worse, whether it is the sight of soured soup and used sanitary towels or the stench or both. Meanwhile, when the garbage collection people come, they cannot clear all the waste because they aren't bagged. They just shovel the much they can and move to another point. What is left then isn't just dirty roads but a dirty city.By the way,
it is the same Port Harcourt—the same Port Harcourt of the nineties—that was clinically neat. Or didn't people generate waste then? Did something change? Does it mean we cannot manage a freer society? Do weneed soldiers strolling around with whips on sanitation days? Does the city now have too many people than it can hold? Or, is someone not doing their job? I do not know!The government spends so much in keeping the city neat. Or should I say dirty seeing that the city isn't neat enough?
Well, we must understand that government isn't merely an institution of governance, but all of us—including the governed. We are answerable for what is becoming of thisplace. Meanwhile, more effort should be geared towards sensitization as sanitation is funded. The people in the relevant offices should do more thanenjoy tax payers' money. They should see that tax payers breathe fresh air.